'With These Kind Of PILs, We Don't Get Time To Deal With Genuine PILs' : Supreme Court Dismisses Plea For OTT Regulation

The Supreme Court today (October 18) dismissed a plea seeking constitution of a board for regulation of content and release of films on the OTT Platform.  

The petitioner mainly contended that there is no regulation for monitoring the OTT Content and the release of the films of OTT. 

"Just last month there were two movies, one was an OTT, one was for the theatre. The theatre movie could not be released till date and the OTT one got released and the Ministry had to intervene etc. The right to equality should be maintained,” the petitioner, appearing in person, said. 

The reliefs in the prayer were to constitute a body or board namely 'Central Board For Regulation Of Monitoring Online Video Contents, (2) appoint an IAS officer at the Secretary Level.

The bench of CJI DY Chandrachud,Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra refused to entertain the petition stating the matter falls in the domain of public policy.

" The problem now is that the kind of PILs that we are getting, we have no time to deal with the genuine PILs. We are only reading PILs of this nature. These are matter of policy- how to regulate the internet, how to regulate the OTT platforms - this is not something we can do under the exercise of the jurisdiction of our power." 

The counsel mentioned that he has moved the present petition in view of the recent striking down of the amended IT Rules of 2021.   

The Bombay High Court in September struck down the 2023 amendments to the IT Rules, which empowers the Central government to establish Fact Check Units (FCUs) to identify "fake and misleading" information about its business on social media platforms.

Case Details : SHASHANK SHEKHAR JHA AND ANR. Versus UNION OF INDIA AND ORS.W.P.(C) No. 669/2024

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